Mohit's bloghttp://www.crystalspace3d.org/blog/mohit
en-UShttp://backend.userland.com/rss60The Crystal lightinghttp://www.crystalspace3d.org/blog/mohit/2010/08/07/the_crystal_lighting
Sat, 07 Aug 2010 12:19:43 +0000mohitGSoC 2010281@http://www.crystalspace3d.org/blog/Finally, after a lot of efforts and a lot of hardwork, lighter2 is able to produce caustics. Also a lot of bugfixes have been made in the original code, the major one being the one with lighting produced with the photons. The power of photons had to be scaled to match the illumination of raytracer, there is no need for that now.
Ok, enough of talking here is something pleasant for your eyes.
(This image was generated without any scaling of photons, and with only photon mapping enabled for direct as well as indirect lighting)
Now, regarding the intricacies of getting photon mapping working.
1.) Added a tag into the world file regarding the material, about whether it can produce caustics or not, also if it can produce caustic, what is the refractive index of the material. (For air the refractive index is considered to be 1, also if it is not mentioned for a caustic producing material, it is assumed to be 1. So, the caustics might not be that accurate, if one doesn't mention the refractive index.)
2.) While parsing the scene, the positions (Bounding spheres) of all the meshes which contain the material which can produce caustics are stored in a list. This list is used in the photon emission stage. The point light is considered to be like a spotlight which emits photons only in the direction of these meshes while emitting caustic photons.
3.) The photon tracing is facilitated with refracting these caustic photons, these photons are traced till the time they hit a diffuse surface, and instead of reflecting these photons in random direction they are refracted using simple laws of refraction (this is the point where refractive index is required).
4.) Finally in the final gathering stage it is not just the normal photon map which is used but also the caustic photon map.
(A lot of debugging and reworking also went into this process, which took all this time)
As for the future, I am trying to gt support for direction and spotlight lights for photon mapping and caustics, and also area lighting. I plan to get these working before the submission date for GSoC, and then it would be time for optimizing lighter2, in my opinion the memory optimization should be of higher priority than time optimization.Finally, after a lot of efforts and a lot of hardwork, lighter2 is able to produce caustics. Also a lot of bugfixes have been made in the original code, the major one being the one with lighting produced with the photons. The power of photons had to be scaled to match the illumination of raytracer, there is no need for that now.

Ok, enough of talking here is something pleasant for your eyes.

(This image was generated without any scaling of photons, and with only photon mapping enabled for direct as well as indirect lighting)

Now, regarding the intricacies of getting photon mapping working.

1.) Added a tag into the world file regarding the material, about whether it can produce caustics or not, also if it can produce caustic, what is the refractive index of the material. (For air the refractive index is considered to be 1, also if it is not mentioned for a caustic producing material, it is assumed to be 1. So, the caustics might not be that accurate, if one doesn't mention the refractive index.)

2.) While parsing the scene, the positions (Bounding spheres) of all the meshes which contain the material which can produce caustics are stored in a list. This list is used in the photon emission stage. The point light is considered to be like a spotlight which emits photons only in the direction of these meshes while emitting caustic photons.

3.) The photon tracing is facilitated with refracting these caustic photons, these photons are traced till the time they hit a diffuse surface, and instead of reflecting these photons in random direction they are refracted using simple laws of refraction (this is the point where refractive index is required).

4.) Finally in the final gathering stage it is not just the normal photon map which is used but also the caustic photon map.

(A lot of debugging and reworking also went into this process, which took all this time)

As for the future, I am trying to gt support for direction and spotlight lights for photon mapping and caustics, and also area lighting. I plan to get these working before the submission date for GSoC, and then it would be time for optimizing lighter2, in my opinion the memory optimization should be of higher priority than time optimization.

]]>http://www.crystalspace3d.org/blog/mohit?p=281&c=1&tb=1&pb=1#commentsSome more colors in the roomhttp://www.crystalspace3d.org/blog/mohit/2010/06/15/some_more_colors_in_the_room
Tue, 15 Jun 2010 17:39:48 +0000mohitGSoC 2010270@http://www.crystalspace3d.org/blog/Ok, I know I am a bit (quite a bit maybe) late at writing this post. But still, the good thing is that I have got something working. But before that there are other important things to write.
Plans:
After some discussions and meeting with my mentor Scott Johnson, we have decided to aim for getting at least the first milestone completed by the mid term evaluation in mid-july. And the first milestone includes three tasks:
1.) Getting the photon coloring stuff working to obtain color bleeding.
2.) Getting photon mapping to work with caustics.
3.) Planning for how to get photon mapping take advantage of multiple cores.
Status:
Well after spending a lot of time to get walktest working on ubuntu, I shifted onto windows with visual studio, just to realize that it wasnt ubuntu but my graphics card,, which wasn't working, after which my brother was generous enough to buy me a new laptop. So, as of now everything is working perfectly fine (in terms of the development environment) but still on windows with VS.
Anyways, coming to the point, the thing which I have got working till now is the photon coloring effect, the effect of color bleeding can be seen in photon mapping.
The steps which I followed were simple, it was to get lighter2 save another copy of the textures for the scene, it saves one copy as of now for direct lighting but that is a filtered image and isn't useful for photon mapping. The next step was to use this image to obtain the color of a particular primitive when it is hit, and multiply it with the color of photon ray to get the color for the photon ray.
Results : Here are a few samples of the cornell map with photon mapping
This was taken with 25M photons and photon rays colors multiplied by 16. The image has a lot of noise most probably because of the photon mapping light scaling.
And another one:
This too has been taken with 25M photons but pm light scaling =10, the color bleeding is too less, but there is lesser noise.
One major issue that I found with photon mapping is the number of photons that are reflected are too less, while using 25M photons, with maxrecursiondepth set to 20, the total number of photons traced were just around 50-51M in most cases. I looked into the code which decided whether to reflect the photon or not, and I think that there are some issues with the criteria to decide the reflectivity of a surface, I will probably try to read more about it and tweak it out to get some better results.Ok, I know I am a bit (quite a bit maybe) late at writing this post. But still, the good thing is that I have got something working. But before that there are other important things to write.

Plans:

After some discussions and meeting with my mentor Scott Johnson, we have decided to aim for getting at least the first milestone completed by the mid term evaluation in mid-july. And the first milestone includes three tasks:

1.) Getting the photon coloring stuff working to obtain color bleeding.
2.) Getting photon mapping to work with caustics.
3.) Planning for how to get photon mapping take advantage of multiple cores.

Status:

Well after spending a lot of time to get walktest working on ubuntu, I shifted onto windows with visual studio, just to realize that it wasnt ubuntu but my graphics card,, which wasn't working, after which my brother was generous enough to buy me a new laptop. So, as of now everything is working perfectly fine (in terms of the development environment) but still on windows with VS.

Anyways, coming to the point, the thing which I have got working till now is the photon coloring effect, the effect of color bleeding can be seen in photon mapping.

The steps which I followed were simple, it was to get lighter2 save another copy of the textures for the scene, it saves one copy as of now for direct lighting but that is a filtered image and isn't useful for photon mapping. The next step was to use this image to obtain the color of a particular primitive when it is hit, and multiply it with the color of photon ray to get the color for the photon ray.

Results : Here are a few samples of the cornell map with photon mapping

This was taken with 25M photons and photon rays colors multiplied by 16. The image has a lot of noise most probably because of the photon mapping light scaling.

And another one:

This too has been taken with 25M photons but pm light scaling =10, the color bleeding is too less, but there is lesser noise.

One major issue that I found with photon mapping is the number of photons that are reflected are too less, while using 25M photons, with maxrecursiondepth set to 20, the total number of photons traced were just around 50-51M in most cases. I looked into the code which decided whether to reflect the photon or not, and I think that there are some issues with the criteria to decide the reflectivity of a surface, I will probably try to read more about it and tweak it out to get some better results.

]]>http://www.crystalspace3d.org/blog/mohit?p=270&c=1&tb=1&pb=1#commentsIntroductionhttp://www.crystalspace3d.org/blog/mohit/2010/06/15/introduction_2
Tue, 15 Jun 2010 16:46:48 +0000mohitGSoC 2010269@http://www.crystalspace3d.org/blog/Hi, to everyone @ crystal space community. I am Mohit Taneja, and I am one of the students selected in GSoC this year to work on crystalspace project.
This summer I would be working on getting the photon mapping work out-of-the-box for lighter2. And also make it more efficient by using better algos for packing lightmaps, and enabling lighter2 to take advantage of available parallelism.
I am a undergraduate student in my final year at NSIT, Delhi, India, with my majors as computer science. I plan to enjoy my work and interaction with the crystalspace community.Hi, to everyone @ crystal space community. I am Mohit Taneja, and I am one of the students selected in GSoC this year to work on crystalspace project.

This summer I would be working on getting the photon mapping work out-of-the-box for lighter2. And also make it more efficient by using better algos for packing lightmaps, and enabling lighter2 to take advantage of available parallelism.

I am a undergraduate student in my final year at NSIT, Delhi, India, with my majors as computer science. I plan to enjoy my work and interaction with the crystalspace community.